Arresting Images

This is Ronald Jones. He served eight years of a death sentence before DNA testing proved he didn’t rape and murder a 28-year-old woman on Chicago’s South Side. Pictured here at the scene of his 1985 arrest, Jones is featured with 44 other wrongly accused people in Taryn Simon’s angry, extraordinary volume of photos and essays, The Innocents (Umbrage, $34.95). One man is snapped embracing the woman who accused him; another now wishes he had a global-positioning device that could provide him an alibi at all times; all feel a palpable sense of injustice and present danger. ”I’ll never be able to feel free,” Jones says in the book. ”Because as long as I’m poor, the same thing that they did to me in 1985, they can do it to me again.”